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Google+ expands SMS support to over 41 countries, lets you stay social over text
On the off chance your cell phone is of the decidedly dumb variety, Mountain View's engineers have worked out an alternative solution to keep your Google + circles intersecting. Initially available only for the U.S. and Indian markets at the time of the social service's launch, the search giant's expanding the reach of its SMS feature to over 41 additional countries, giving users the option to post updates, as well as receive and reply to notifications via text. The feature isn't standard, so if you want to opt-in, you'll have to enable it in the settings menu first, provided your carrier is supported. Luddites that like to have their online cake and eat it too, might want to make sure they're packing an appropriately capacious mobile plan before those thumbs get to banging away. Of course, the rest of you modernists are more than welcome to join the party, but why would you?
AT&T opens Watson API up to developers
Admit it, you don't have nearly enough opportunities to talk back to your phone. AT&T is giving you more. The company today announced that it will be offering its Watson real-time speech-to-text software to developers as APIs aimed at a number of different application types -- things like web search, question and answer apps and anything that uses AT&T's U-Verse TV services. A number of additional varieties are also in the works, including gaming and social media. Check out a cheery informational video after the break.
Daily iPad App: Say Anything lets you get somebody's attention without saying a thing
Sometimes you need to get a person's attention without saying a word. You can wave your hand wildly at them, but all that vigorous movement may scare them away. A better way to get someone's attention is to pull out your iPad and fire up a banner app like Say Anything from Appy Inc. Say Anything is a simple banner app that lets you type in text and scroll it across your iPad's display just like a ticker tape. It has a swipe-based interface that uses both vertical and horizontal swiping gestures. A horizontal swipe sets your banner in motion and controls the speed, while a vertical swipe lets you scroll among your messages. Speaking of messages, your messages can have unlimited characters and you can save them for later use. You can save an unlimited number of preset messages (99-cent in-app purchase required) and use a favorites list to make it easy to find your most used messages. Unlike the paper banners of yore, you can jazz up your messages on the fly by changing the background color and adjusting the font color and face. There's also a mirror mode that's available as a 99-cent in-app purchase. Your message and its background are fully customizable, but, like mirror mode and unlimited presets, these changes come with a cost. If you want to adjust the size of the text, add more fonts or swap out the background for an image or a texture, you have to activate those features via an in-app purchase. Each feature costs 99-cents, but you can save yourself some cash and buy all five features (fonts, scaling, background, mirror and unlimited preset messages) for a reasonable US$1.99. What sets Say Anything apart from its competition is its ease of use and quality design. It's a fast, responsive app with a clean UI that lets you get your message across to someone in just a few seconds. I've been using it off and on for the past few weeks and am pleased with its performance. The developers are also responsive to problems and committed to producing a quality app. Say Anything is available for free from the iOS App Store, so you can try the basic features of the app without spending any money. If you like the app, then you should spend the $1.99 to unlock all five features and get rid of those pop-ups that appear every time you click on a paid feature that you haven't bought yet. You'll be glad you did.
Daily iPhone App: Drafts lets you save short snippets of text
Drafts from Agile Tortoise is the ideal digital notepad for the person who wants to capture a thought before it's gone. It has a simple UI that doesn't get in the way of its primary function, which is jotting down notes. The app opens to an empty draft that's ready for you to record your latest thoughts, type out the draft of a tweet or prep some markdown code. Drafts's emphasis is on quick and easy notes that can be shared on Twitter, email, or copied to the clipboard. It also supports markdown so you're not limited to plain text. Drafts has several small but handy features. The app keeps track of both your word and character count, which is extremely useful when you are composing a character-limited tweet or a text message. There's also a search function that'll help you find the important note you created last month. If you own the companion app Terminology, you can highlight a word in Drafts and easily look up its definition and usage. Drafts is available in the iOS App Store for US$0.99. It works on the iPhone and requires iOS 5.0.
iTextEditors provides quick app reference for plain text fans
The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who love to edit text files on the iPad, and those who really, really don't. For everyone in the first group, our resident mad scientist Brett Terpstra (ably assisted by a crew of volunteers including TUAW contributor Michael Jones) has kicked off the iTextEditors reference page. The page provides a full feature matrix for more than 30 iOS editors, with more entries on the way. Looking for an editor with printing capability, Dropbox sync and word count for $0.99? The chart's got you covered (several times over, actually, including iA Writer). Brett plans to continue updating the page indefinitely, so if you're a developer (or ardent and well-informed fan) of an application that's not yet on his list, check out the page and let him know.
Virgin Mobile USA restores service, apologizes for the inconvenience
A dozen or so hours after the carrier came clean with its most recent outage, Virgin Mobile USA service has been restored. Data, texts and calls should be flowing normally now, and the company has stated that those still experiencing issues should "try removing your battery and restarting your device." Not recommended? "Visiting your nearest T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon or Boost Mobile retailer." Curious, right?
Virgin Mobile USA's text and data services are out across the USA
As customers of Sprint's contract-averse MVNO have probably noticed, Virgin Mobile has been having a national outage of its text and data services for at least several hours now. While we're hearing from some customers it's been out all day, acknowledgement of the disruption only just became Facebook official. There's no word yet when it will be resolved however, as we're only getting the "engineers are working to resolve it" boilerplate for now. Until then we'd suggest enjoying the few activities that are still possible without wireless internet access, if those are even still a thing.[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Researchers find fewer words being added to languages, fewer ways to tell you precisely that
What if one of the words in this post means absolutely nothing in the year 2094? It's possible, and more possible than ever before. That's according to recently published research from a group at the Institutions Markets Technologies' Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy, who have found that fewer new words are being added to languages today than in eras prior. Despite the proliferation of the internet and untold new ways to communicate, more and more words are being eliminated while fewer words replace them. It's hard to pinpoint the exact reason(s) why, but most gurus suggest that reliance on rigid spellcheck tools and the rise of short-form communication have made it less necessary to find new ways to say things. You can read more on the findings there in the source link, where we're sure master wordsmiths will be saddened by the lack of descriptive flair.
Nokia penalised for texting tips to Aussie users, regrets not adding unsubscribe option
Here's a bit of bad news for those who actually enjoy receiving Nokia's regular tips via SMS: Reuters reports that the Australian Communications and Media Authority has slapped the Finnish company a hefty A$55,000 ($58,000) fine, with the reason being that there was no way to unsubscribe from said messages. This kind of flaw sure is a surprise at this day and age, but Nokia's already taken action by simply axing this spammy service entirely in Australia, while at the same time "ramping it down elsewhere" just to be safe, according to Reuters. If Pope Benedict is still going about his texting business over there, we sure hope he won't be next on the Aussie naughty list. [Image credit: Ester Inbar]
WWDC Alerts will help make sure you get into Moscone
Two Mac developers have created an alerts service, which you can sign up for free right now, that will let you know the very moment that tickets go on sale for this year's WWDC in San Francisco. Just put in your cell phone number, send back one code for verification, and then you'll get a text the instant tickets show up, which should give you a nice head start on making sure you get in the door for the conference. There's also a Twitter account to follow if you want something that might get you a little less spam, but the makers of the alert system say they won't forward your details to anyone or misuse the list at all, so if you trust them, it shouldn't be an issue. Obviously this service is being seen by a ton of people, so I'm not sure how much help it will actually be, but any heads up is better than nothing. If you're planning to try going to WWDC this year, good luck! [via TNW]
Did you fire off a bunch of texts this Christmas? Welcome to the museum
Finland might be the spiritual home of the SMS, but it also proves that this ancient form of communication is going the way of the rune stone. A mere 8.5 million texts were sent over the country's Sonera network on Christmas Eve, versus 10.9 million on that festive day in 2010. The same trend was spotted on other Finnish networks and also on the other side of the world: Christmas Day texts in Hong Kong were down nearly 14 percent on the year before, and Telstra in Australia experienced a nine percent year-on-year decline over the whole of 2011. Things are different in America, where texting has continued to grow, but that growth seems to be slowing down and some analysts expect "SMS erosion" to hit Verizon and AT&T by 2014. The obvious culprit is mobile internet: social networking apps, BBM, iMessage and a host of other 'free' options, but you won't find carriers complaining -- data contract ARPUs suit them just fine.
Google Translate app update adds handwriting recognition, breaks barriers
The Google Translate app for Android received a pretty significant update yesterday, bringing handwriting recognition to its bullpen of functionalities. The app, which added voice recognition back in October, can now recognize handwriting in seven different languages, including English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. It's probably most important, however, for Chinese- and Japanese-speaking contingents, who can now use their handsets to translate characters that aren't typically featured on English keypads. The update to version 2.3 is available now, at the source link below.
Some Android phones fail to enforce permissions, exposed to unauthorized app access
Eight Android phones, including the Motorola Droid X and Samsung Epic 4G, were found to house major permission flaws according to a research team at North Carolina State University. Their study revealed untrusted applications could send SMS messages, record conversations and execute other potentially malicious actions without user consent. Eleven of the thirteen areas analyzed (includes geo-location and access to address books) showed privileges were exposed by pre-loaded applications. Interestingly, Nexus devices were less vulnerable, suggesting that the other phone manufacturers may have failed to properly implement Android's security permissions model. Google and Motorola confirm the present flaws while HTC and Samsung remain silent. Exerting caution when installing applications should keep users on their toes until fixes arrive. [Thanks, John]
CEO bans email, encourages social networking
Who needs email when you have text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a menagerie of alternative communication tools? Not Atos, a French IT firm that's planning to give email the boot. Over the course of the next eighteen months, CEO Thierry Breton hopes to ween 80,000 employees off of the old standby, pushing text messages, phone calls and face-to-face chats as alternatives. Breton strives to promote a collaborative social network similar to Facebook or Twitter to fill email's void and suffice as an easily accessible global network. Having himself been email sober at work for three years, Breton claims email is inefficient, and a burden to the workflow. Will this new social environment promote efficiency, or will pet photos and status updates become the new spam? If employees can't keep their social inclinations under wraps, Atos may have to resort to the Medieval carrier pigeon. Delivery estimates for long distance range from five days to never.
DreamWorks CEO envisions an internet with more animation, fewer words
Is the internet on the cusp of a post-text era? Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg certainly thinks so. Speaking at the Techonomy conference in Tucson yesterday, Katzenberg confirmed that his company is already working on expanding 3D animation to the realm of social media, as part of a collaboration with Intel. As Technology Review reports, the two companies have been working on the project for the better part of four years, developing 12-core chips and software capable of delivering real-time photographic animation. Katzenberg didn't offer many details beyond that, but seemed confident that his company's new technology could radically alter the way users share and engage with online content by transcending the boundaries of traditional text. "Text is a learned process but what we do [at Dreamworks] is intuitive and instinctual and you do it from the moment you are born," he said, "We're trying to see if we can move many of these things we can do today in text but moving up to video and audio... with sight and sound." The exec went on to cite Apple's Siri personal assistant as proof that this transition is already underway: "Whether we do it or somebody else does it, we will move from a text world into a audio visual one." Intriguing claims, to be sure, but we'll know more next year, when Dreamworks' new campaign gets underway.
Auto-complete keyboard found in iOS 5
It seems iOS 5 is full of hidden "gems" (aka features Apple didn't deem worthy of making publicly available yet), like the earlier panorama camera stitching feature. This time, hacker Sonny Dickson found an Android-like word suggestion bar tucked away in iOS 5. Personally I'm not a huge fan of these, but some people feel it speeds up typing and is helpful. I think it takes up too much real estate and looks clunky. There are instructions on how to enable this, and just like enabling the panorama mode you'll be using iBackupBot to ensure you don't louse anything up permanently, then editing a plist file in your Library. In our brief testing we found the feature crashed Notes and Mail, and wouldn't show up in Safari, indicating it probably only works in Text Views, not Text Fields (like the Safari URL field). Neat, but is it really necessary? Let us know in the comments if you'll be enabling this feature on your iPhone or iPad.
Republic Wireless goes live, brings unlimited data, text and calls to LG Optimus users
Well, that didn't take too long. As promised, Republic Wireless flipped the switch on its new unlimited everything plan today, offering a smorgasbord of wireless talk, text and data for the flat fee of $19 per month. The trick, of course, is Republic's dependence upon the UMA wireless technology, also employed by T-Mobile. You won't have to open a dedicated app to use the service (currently in beta), though you will need a home connection speed of 80kbps both ways in order to actually hold a call. You'll also need a "Hybrid Calling"-enabled LG Optimus handset (bundled under the company's $199 startup fee), though the provider plans to add more devices in the near future. For more details, hit up the source link below.
iSpy software can read texts and steal passwords with its little eye (video)
We spy, with our bleary eye, a new piece of software that could make it dramatically easier to steal personal data. The program, known as iSpy, allows devious voyeurs to remotely identify and read text typed on touchscreen displays. That, in and of itself, isn't exactly new, but iSpy takes shoulder surfing to slightly terrifying new areas -- namely, those beyond the "shoulder." Developed by Jan-Michael Frahm and Fabian Monrose of the UNC-Chapel Hill, this program, like those before it, takes advantage of the magnified keys found on most touchscreens. All you'd have to do is point a camera at someone else's screen and iSpy will automatically record whatever he or she types by stabilizing the video footage and identifying the enlarged keys. If you're using a smartphone camera, you'll be able to eavesdrop from up to three meters away, but if you opt for a more heavy duty DSLR device, you could steal passwords from up to 60 meters away. The software can also recognize any words typed into a device, and, according to its architects, can identify letters with greater than 90 percent accuracy. When used with a DSLR camera, iSpy can even pick up on reflections of touchscreens in sunglasses or window panes from up to 12 meters away. To avoid this, Frahm and Monrose recommend disabling the magnified key function on your smartphone, or using some sort of screen shield. We recommend checking out a video of the program, after the break.
Facebook Messenger sinks Beluga, Raffi heads back to the drawing board
Beluga has just confirmed the inevitable -- it's being swallowed by Facebook Messenger. The group messaging app will no longer send texts as of November 11th and will shut down for good on December 15th, just a few months after Zuckerberg & Co acquired it, alongside digital book-maker Push Pop Press. "Now that Facebook Messenger is available everywhere, we've decided to stop offering Beluga as a separate service," the company explained in a blog post last week. If you'd like to grab an archive of your pods before the December 15th shutdown, you can do so at the coverage link below. Otherwise, just head past the break to join us in maritime remembrance.
SuperNote lets you take some pretty super notes on your ASUS tablet (video)
Sit back and take notes while we... talk about SuperNote. This note-taking app quietly debuted on the Eee Pad Transformer and Slider earlier this month, when ASUS rolled out an OTA update to Android 3.2.1, but the company has now provided substantially more details on the feature, which promises to "revolutionize the way you take notes in class." With SuperNote onboard, students can write or scribble using either the keyboard or their own fingers. That isn't exactly enthralling, in and of itself, but what's cool is the fact that SuperNote will convert each hand-drawn item into an image, allowing users to seamlessly modify or delete their own characters as if they were typed text. The tool also makes it easy to insert graphs or charts, thanks to an "Add Annotation" option that integrates diagrams directly into your lecture notes. And, perhaps best of all, the app will even let you insert photos, meaning you can just take a shot of your professor's blackboard and worry about understanding it later. Intrigued? Check out a demo video, after the break.
